Are Animals Organizing Against Us? Definitely!

“There is, for example, the case of Tatiana, a four-and-a-half year old Siberian tiger in the San Francisco zoo who in 2007 scaled the twelve-foot high wall of her enclosure to attack three teenagers who had been annoying her by shouting obscenities, waving their arms and possibly throwing things at her. After she ripped one of them to pieces, the other two ran away, with Tatiana in hot pursuit…. [And then there is] John Vaillant’s highly entertaining The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, in which a wild Siberian tiger stalks and eats a human poacher who had been catching tiger cubs for their skins and eating their flesh. The avenging tiger attacked no other humans, despite opportunities to do so, but he destroyed everything bearing the poacher’s scent, including the pots that had been used for cooking tiger cubs.”
 — Barbara Ehrenreich reviews the literature of our troubled relationship with animals, concluding that there are signs of a global animal uprising. Okay, not really quite that: There is not “any evidence yet of cross-species coordination against human hegemony.” But she said “yet”!